Game review: Magicka 2 - a little less magical than the original

The original Magicka was a cult fantasy favourite: originally released in 2011, on its surface the top-down dungeon crawler game was a sneaky parody of genre tropes, developed by a group of smartass Swedish students and packed with Star Trek jokes and Zelda references.

Underneath all that lay a diverse action-adventure set-up, where a surprisingly robust spellcasting system allowed you to be an omnipotent mage if you so wished. Or, you could abuse your trial-and-error elemental abilities, concoct ridiculously nonsensical potions ("fire plus earth, equals flaming rocks!") and generally wreak havoc alongside a group of friends in its explosion-filled worlds.

That's a pretty apt description of Magicka 2 as well, and we're sorry to break it to those eagerly awaiting this follow-up for the PC and PS4: this isn't really a sequel. It's kind of like a remake, although there are references to the first game and a sense of an attempted follow-through. It's not really an add-on, although the additional levels may make it feel like nothing more.

What it is more than anything though, is a bit of a disappointment. While the graphics and UI have been improved, and the game amped up for a newer console generation, Magicka's sense of amusing wonder and discovery isn't on board.